Hey Legacy players! ELM 2023 is in the books and that can only mean one thing: time to look forward to ELM 2024!

With this article, we’d like to walk you through the process of how the 2024 qualifying structure came to be.

Reminder: How did the 2023 Qualifier Season work?

For the 2023 season, we used an estimate for community sizes given there wasn’t any data on the subject available. It was decided to use population size as a proxy. We were aware this wasn’t fully representative of the data we were looking for, but it was the best we had to work with.

We’ve given each community a baseline of four slots and scaled the rest according to population size. After a review and some adjustments where we deemed them necessary, we arrived at the following distribution for our regional slots:

• 8 Slots: Germany, Italy
• 7 Slots: Spain, United Kingdom
• 6 Slots: France, Poland
• 5 Slots: Austria, Sweden
• 4 Slots: Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, Switzerland

In addition to those Regional Slots, large international events were treated separately. If an event was open to attend for all Legacy players and reached 100+ participants an additional slot was granted to that tournament.

ELM 2023 Qualifier Data

We had close to 100 qualifiers happening all across Europe for ELM 2023! Or to put it differently: in total around 5000 Legacy players participated in the ELM 2023 season! That’s truly amazing and we’d like to thank every single one of you for participating.

Additionally, we were able to meticulously collect the data from all our qualifier events for the entirety of the ELM 2023 Qualifying Season. Now we finally have some data which we can use to better estimate player numbers in our communities. Without further ado, here’s what the number crunch looks like:

Now let’s dive a little into the details of those numbers. Please keep in mind that these numbers are based on the Regional Slots we distributed ahead of the season. International Events (100+ players) are treated separately and therefore do not appear in those statistics.

• # Events: the total number of events a community hosted. Events include open tournaments and league play
• per Event: Some qualifiers offered multiple slots. These were counted a single time
• per Slot: Multislot events are counted multiple times (e.g. you had an 80 player tournament awarding two slots, for the purposes of the data, we worked off the premise that you hosted two separate events with 80 players each)
• adjusted per Slot: Multislot events are split by the number of slots they awarded (e.g. you had an 80 player tournament awarding two slots, we pretend you hosted two separate events with 40 players each)

Now how do these numbers come together? For open tournaments this is pretty straightforward: we just took the participation number. For league play however, it was a little more difficult. In the end, we decided to take the number of individual players who participated over the entire season as the player participation number.

Goals for ELM 2024 Qualifier Season

For the ELM 2024 Qualifier Season, we had a couple of goals in mind when deciding how to distribute the 100 Regional Slots:

1. Scale slots with community size
2. Don’t crush struggling communities
3. Reward communities for making the effort running tournaments for every single one of their slots

The first point is pretty self-explanatory. The more players are in a given community the more players should represent the community at ELM 2024.

One of the goals of the ELM project is to grow Legacy across Europe. We don’t want to strip a community of most of their slots for ELM 2024 just because they struggled during the ELM 2023 season. However, we also did not want to give them a free pass. This wouldn’t feel justified when you observe how much effort other communities put into their qualifier season.

And lastly we want to reward communities who organise individual events for each of their Regional Slots. A community which hosted two 80 player events for two slots should be rewarded higher compared to a community which hosted a single 80 player event giving away two slots.

The ELM 2024 Qualification Structure

With our goals in mind we agreed to the following means of distribution:

• Half of the slots are distributed equally across all communities (2.25 slots per community)
• Half of the slots are distributed proportionally according to average number of participants adjusted per slot
• The mathematical result is rounded to the nearest full slot
• Review and adjust where deemed necessary

Where we had the minimum number of Regional Slots at four for last season we can’t continue with that baseline moving forward. ELM is growing (which is great!) and we are looking forward to hosting players from 22 different countries at ELM 2024. However fixing the minimum allocation at four would already put the allocation at 88 / 100 slots given away which would a) leave us with very limited flexibility for distribution and b) severely limit our growth for future editions of the ELM essentially capping us at 25 nations. Therefore we compromised to distribute around half of our 100 slots evenly.

The other half is scaled based on the average participants adjusted per slot. This is the number most in line with our goals. We are aware this isn’t a perfect method but we feel it is close enough to ensure our overall goals and account for the growth of the ELM.

Doing all of the above with the magic of Excel lead us to a mathematical distribution which we then have to round to the nearest full slot to make sense for us. This provided the following results:

• 8 Slots: Germany
• 7 Slots: Netherlands
• 6 Slots: Austria, Italy, Spain, Switzerland
• 5 Slots: Denmark, Finland, France, Poland, Sweden
• 4 Slots: Belgium, Czech Republic, Portugal, United Kingdom
• 3 Slots: Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Norway, Slovakia
• 2 Slots: Ireland, Luxembourg

The qualification team decided from this that some adjustments were deemed necessary.

Ireland had to opt out of the ELM 2023 Qualifier Season and therefore had 0 participation. Luxembourg is joining the ELM project for ELM 2024. Both were given the benefit of the doubt and their slots increased to 3.

Furthermore, we agreed to limit slot changes from the 2023 Season to the 2024 Season to two slots. The Netherlands and United Kingdom would have respectively had a huge change to their slots according to our distribution. We have therefore decreased the Dutch slots to 6 and increased the British slots to 5.

Lastly, we felt like Italy wasn’t represented accordingly due to the way their 2023 qualification structure focusing on league across the region. We’ve therefore increased their slots to 8.

ELM 2024 Qualifier Season Slot Distribution

With all of the above in mind, we finally arrived to the final distrubtion of slots for the ELM 2024 Qualifier Season:

• 8 Slots: Germany, Italy
• 6 Slots: Austria, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland
• 5 Slots: Denmark, Finland, France, Poland, Sweden, United Kingdom
• 4 Slots: Belgium, Czech Republic, Portugal
• 3 Slots: Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, Slovakia

You can find the numbers and calculations for all of the above and even more here.

Premier (non-regional) Qualifiers

Similar to the previous season we will be offering non-regional invites to selected events. First on the list is ELM 2023 where both finalists will requalify for ELM 2024.

Finally, large international events that will be hosting events with over 100+ participants and open to attend for all Legacy players can apply with their regional representative for a non-regional slot. This will provide an opportunity for large tournament organisers to showcase the highest Legacy play with added stakes and glory.

The 2024 Qualifier Season will end on July 31st 2024.